


Rain-Bringer

by Moorishflower



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-17
Updated: 2012-04-17
Packaged: 2017-11-03 08:49:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/379520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Moorishflower/pseuds/Moorishflower
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John is the oasis to Sherlock's desert.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rain-Bringer

In London it is always raining. Or on the verge of raining, or, having just rained, is misty and damp, the air smelling of crisp cool water, the smog from the cars and, if you are close enough, the living-green-strange odor of the Thames.

John has always done better in the rain. Has always felt a bit stronger, a bit faster, a bit smarter whenever the skies grow dark with stormclouds. Afghanistan had been Hell for him the first few months, the sun scorching, his tongue parched; he had emptied his canteen more frequently than the rest of his regiment, and he had paid the price until he’d learned to control his thirst. Showers were few and far between, and the water they brought up in villages and makeshift camps was often murky, and smelled strongly of minerals. John had thought he would die out there, not of bullets or roadside bombs, but of the horrible, aching thirst, like every pore in his body had opened and was desperately grasping at the hot, unforgiving air. He’d felt like he was made of dust, like he was pulling all that sand and grit into his body, desperate for just a little bit of water, just a hint of rain. It’s why he could never live anywhere but London. It’s one of the reasons why he’d come back, even though the offer to stay on as a medical officer had been made (and he couldn’t take it, could never be anywhere but the front lines, gun in one hand and tourniquet in the other).

When John was seven, his mother took him outside just as the rain was beginning to fall, a glorious sheet of ice-cold water cleaning away the last remnants of dirty, downtrodden snow. She’d showed him how to cup his hands and let the water pool between his fingers, how to imagine it sinking down into his skin, how to feel it within himself like a heartbeat. She had showed him how to find the perfect branch, two-pronged at one end, plucking one from a tree just beginning to put out the green buds of its Spring foliage, and how to use it like a compass, letting it direct him towards clean water, as fast and accurate as a dog or fox.

There were no branches in Afghanistan. No clean water. No rain pooling against his skin.

221b is muggy, and smells faintly of formaldehyde and burnt pizza, so John opens a window. He would open a window regardless, but now he has an excuse to linger in the living room, his head hung out while the rain patters against his scalp, his bare face. Water pools on the sill, around his hands, dripping down onto the carpet just below the window. It’s a downpour, and in the distance he hears the rumble of thunder, getting closer. Exhilaration blooms, crackling and bright, suffusing him, and he feels as though all his blood has suddenly become brilliant and weightless light.

“John, close the window, it’s _freezing_.”

John pulls his head back in, head and neck and parts of his shoulders drenched, and Sherlock is standing there in the doorway staring at him like he’s a madman. Perhaps he is. John laughs, and goes to Sherlock, grabs his arm and tugs him closer to the window. “Come look,” he says. “It’s gorgeous out.”

In his regiment there was a soldier named Kouta. He was older, and while his mother was British his father had been born in Japan, a poor man who’d married for love rather than wealth, much to his family’s dismay. Kouta had weathered the heat with a stoic neutrality that John had envied, and had spent a few minutes every other day making small, ghostlike dolls out of scraps of paper, and cloth, and anything he could get his hands on that was even vaguely white. He had hung these ghosts, upside-down, around his tent when they were camped, and from the rearview of his truck when they weren’t, and when John had asked what they were for he had said they were an old farmer’s superstition. Hanging one upside-down was supposed to bring rain.

He pulls Sherlock to him, nearly flush as they hang themselves out the window, John nearly vertical in his excitement. The thunder rolls around them, much closer, and a streak of lightning makes the clouds above them seem like dark, cracked eggs, the golden glow of something beyond the sky spilling out. Sherlock makes a vast noise of protest, but doesn’t tug, doesn’t struggle, and they stand there with their upper bodies half-out the window, the rain pelting them.

“It’s _wet_ ,” Sherlock shouts, above the roar of the rain, the thunder, and John laughs, and laughs. Maybe if he stands on his head the rain will keep up? “John, what on earth are you...”

And John is overcome with the rain, the sleek fluid intensity of the storm, and the sweetness of Sherlock’s warmth pressed all along his side. He turns until they’re facing each other, and shoves his way into Sherlock’s space. The disparity in height lies in their legs, and so John is pressed comfortably against Sherlock’s thighs, erection hot and heavy, his heart throbbing with the sound of rain. Sherlock stares down at him, eyes blown wide by darkness, by, maybe, something else. “I see,” he says. “Are you...?”

“Yes. _Yes_.” Sherlock brings his thigh up, a slow grind against John’s crotch, and it’s wonderful, brilliant; he winds his fingers in the collar of Sherlock’s shirt, the silk wet through with rain, Sherlock’s hair in sodden curls sticking to his forehead and plastered to his scalp. John, leaning up, licks rainwater from Sherlock’s chin, his lips, slips his tongue past teeth and into warm and wet and _good_. He drinks from him like a hummingbird, licks water from cheeks and along rigid bone, scrape of tongue against stubble, and all the while Sherlock is letting John rut against him, rocking, a deep twist low in his gut.

“Shall I attribute this to the rain, then?” Sherlock’s voice is breathless, rough, as low and gravelly as the thunder. John snorts against the curve of his neck, leans up to kiss him again, to nip at his bottom lip.

“Don’t be obtuse,” he murmurs. “I’ve always wanted you. But you were...”

“Married to my work.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s an open relationship.” John wriggles, slow and deliberate. Feels Sherlock’s prick straining against his belly. “ _Yes_ , just like...”

“I know.” He shoves his hand between them, fumbles with Sherlock’s trousers, button and zip resisting his attempts until Sherlock finally makes an impatient noise and shoves him away. John has to stand off to the side, rain-dazed and lightheaded, while Sherlock undoes his fly and rucks his trousers and pants down around his ankles, stepping easily out of them. Then Sherlock’s hands are on _his_ trousers, undoing his belt, yanking them down, and John holds his hands against Sherlock’s chest, keeping him at bay while he looks his fill.

Sherlock’s whippet-thin and all made up of sharp angles and straight lines. He’s got no arse to speak of, but his hipbones fit to John’s palms when he rests them there, and his cock juts long and flushed from the thatch of dark curls at his groin. The foreskin hasn’t retracted fully, not yet, so John, biting his bottom lip, curls his fingers ‘round the length of Sherlock’s prick, thumb smoothing back the still-loose skin. He gets a gasp in response, a trembling roll of the hips. John feels hard enough that he’s half-worried he’ll break, shatter all over the floor and dissolve into rain, but then Sherlock presses up to him, pushes him back and back, against the wall, warming him with his body. John feels the chill of the storm bleed out of him, and he’s left boneless and gasping.

“Extraordinary,” Sherlock is whispering. “Oh, _brilliant_.”

“Listen.” John swallows Sherlock’s voice, kisses him breathless, and when he tears their mouths apart again he says it again, “ _Listen_. The rain’s...”

Slowing, slowing. Sherlock snarls something, wordless and animal, and grinds against John. Their cocks line up, a sudden and shivering pleasure that steals John’s thoughts, does away with them, a thief in the night. Sherlock closes his hand around them both, long fingers, perfect, wringing a gasp from himself and a tortured whine from John.

“I want to see you next time,” Sherlock mutters. “All of you, naked, every secret you have, I want to open you and climb inside and...”

“ _Yes_.” Unconditional acceptance. Sherlock’s fingers steal back to his balls, rub firm and precise and lovely, and John buries his mouth against Sherlock’s neck to stifle his shout.

“It’s the rain.” His words are muffled by skin. “It’s the rain, God, the...”

Sherlock’s other hand curls in the short hair at the nape of his neck, guides his head back, and he sees in Sherlock’s eyes that vast and wild desert, Kandahar and Helmand and Zabul, but he hears the rain outside, feels it like an endless well flowing from him to Sherlock, and isn’t afraid. Sherlock has drained everyone else, has left them dry husks baking in his sun, but the rain in John is endless, and cold, and forever.

They grind against each other to the sound of thunder and with the shadows of lightning flashing across their faces, and when Sherlock comes it’s with a muffled, almost startled _ah ah ah_ noise. John reaches between them to feel the pulse of come over his fingers, sticky across their thighs and their stomachs. Sherlock’s thin chest heaves as John licks into his mouth, and his own noise is swallowed as rain floods through him and he comes, on and on, a deep well.

Outside, the rain eases, but doesn’t stop. London’s rain is omnipresent, and John finds comfort in this as, sweating and tired, they sink down onto the floor, Sherlock’s long legs folding up and circling around John, the two of them facing each other, breathing quietly in the dark.

When he was a teenager, John’s mother, half-dead from a failing liver, had demanded that he go outside, that he let the rain fall upon his face, that he take it into himself. _Someday there will be a tree that needs you to find it water,_ she’d said. _And you have to be ready for it._

He presses his mouth to Sherlock’s skin, the phantom scent of dust and heat lingering, and breathes.


End file.
